I have to say that’s pretty accurate. If you want to take your test and discover your archetype go here.
daily thoughts on game design
Tag: professional
Many confuse casual games with simple games. Casual games permit the satisfaction of instinctual needs in small (2–5 minute) play sessions. However, many hardcore players of these casual games can play them for hours. In fact, they are the players who actually maintain the business.
I’ve worked on a bunch of them, and I feel like a clockmaker. They may feel simple, but they are deep: you move one gear and you must check all the others connected to it. You need patience to achieve the sweet spot (the perfect balance).
To properly study your competitors, you need to analyze them in immense detail. You may even need to record a session and review it frame-by-frame to fully understand the game’s circuit and how it works.
I have met plenty of professionals who don’t actually love working in games, including game designers. I’m sure this is not news to you, and I also believe that everyone has a right to work in an industry as big as gaming, even if only for a while.
Yesterday, I met one of these people, who told me, “Videogames are your beach!” (using a Brazilian, Rio de Janeiro slang phrase). And I agree; I genuinely love my profession.
I have proof of that because I often put myself in a vulnerable financial position just for the sake of engaging in game design. A client might offer me shares as part of my compensation. If I like the client or the project, I accept, even if I know I may never see any money from it. I know that my task will end, the client will close the collaboration, and I will lose all shares.
I know this, and I consciously make that choice because I love what I do.
But I deeply respect the professionals who don’t care too much—the ones who pass through the industry like tourists, earn some money, and move on. They will have the opportunity to explore different things, and their minds probably won’t be 110% focused on games all the time, unlike mine. I respect that attitude very much as well.
Previous post I talked about being part of a high performance team and how we’re able to become so effective in term of our output. This post is about a personal observation in how I’m able to work in such an environment and keep up with the team.
I’ve noticed that my contribution is not consistent. It is fast one day and slow the other day. Ow how I used to hate the fact that I’m slow on certain days, or sometimes even extended periods of time, while seeing the fast periods as normal. But I’ve come to understand that these slower days have a purpose.
Sometimes, being slow means that you need to recover and reenergize from a previous high performance day.
At other times the slower days means that for that particular moment I should spend my time working on something else. When it comes to new ideas and design solutions they sometimes it just require me to be in a particular mood, a particular zone in order for ideas and solutions to come naturally and fast.
Sometimes, being slow means I do not have enough input, or just not spend enough time on finding the solution. Sometimes, it means that I just need to stare longer at the particular problem I want to solve.
In the end, I came to realize that being able to be fast and productive I have to accept that being slow at other times is just part of the process and one does not exist without the other. I’m becoming more mindful of my energy, my own flow, my own limitations and my own process. I’m more accepting of myself.
I insist a lot on the importance of entertainment when we design new games. I spoke on this blog regarding the satisfaction of core instincts, and I am aware that someone would need something more actionable and practical. The easy resource is KPIs, which often are seeing like targets to hit. They aren’t in my opinion: they are diagnostic tools for spotting flaws in your gameplay, indicators.
For every feature, we first define the specific utility it provides, and then we measure its impact on player behavior.
| Player Instinct | The Utility Provided | Impact (examples) |
| Acquisition (Urge to collect) | Giving the player interesting things to collect that drive progression. | Completion Rate (Quests, levels, and the final game). |
| Social Connection (Gregariousness) | Maintaining engagement and fostering community. | Stickiness and high D7 Retention. Track the specific flows to connect with others and also the number of social interactions. |
| Assertiveness & Mastery | The feeling of power and competence within a core system. | Win Rate and Feature Usage. |
| Curiosity | Satisfying the urge to discover new things. | High Session Length. Qualitatively, the best sign is playtesters who genuinely want more at the end of a prototype. Check also heuristics after a playtest |
Prototypes are essential, especially when playtested and attached to heuristics. By leading with the projected impact on player behavior, we demonstrate business value. This is how we continue the pursuit of l’avenir, the radical, unexpected break from the past.
I’ve been working in a high performance environment for many years now. I’m amazed about the output of our small team (6 FTE+1 Free Lancer). To give you an example, we’re currently working on a casual puzzle game with a huge focus on narrative and world building. We’re approaching our 2 week release cadence which includes six to seven new fully animated story chapters and 90+ new levels, while releasing big new features every 4 weeks, with small and big tweaks, SDK updates, data gathering and general improvements, bug fixes and localization in many languages, while making sure we keep analyzing incoming data.
The casual puzzle space in which we’re operating is very competitive with thousands of entries a year with only a handful being able to succeed and enter the top 100. To get there, large teams (50-500 members) and large investments (1M-5M) are our competitors. And even in those teams, pressure to succeed is high and nothing but top performance is expected.
I’ve been thinking how we as a team make sure we are coping with this pressure. I believe we each individually have found a way to cope and collectively as a team found a way to facilitate and support each other. A large contributing factor for our small team is working from home. Not only does it cut out commute every day, saving a lot of time for each member. Working from home also afforded the environment where flexibility can occur. This flexibility in terms of working hours for instance is where some of our team members thrive.
We roughly work between 9-5 with strict attention rules around meetings. At least half of our team enjoys the ability to work during the quiet evenings, or pursuit a particular thought in the night. Others are able to schedule kids pick-up or going to the gym. And all of us enjoy the ability to let life happen and attend any important activity during working hours. Our team treats work as the second most important thing, next to our life outside of work. We cover for each other when someone is ill or experiences life changing events, we plan our schedules and priorities around vacations and time off, we accommodate members traveling the world and working from different time zone and generally we all help each other make it work.
But I think all of this would not be possible without a shared goal, without a shared ambition, without our internal drive to want to succeed. This focus enables us to do all of the above and I’m sure will drive us towards success.
Tatu Pohjavirta, an experienced CEO and futurist, recently posted a brilliant take on why Venture Capitalists, and so developers, get stuck. They ask, “Are you the next Supercell?” or “What’s the next Netflix?”
As Tatu points out, they are looking for le futur, the foreseeable sequel to the present, when what truly changes the world is l’avenir, the radical, unexpected break from the past.
“The true future doesn’t really inherit the present—it breaks from it.”
This is an inability to step outside the invisible grasp of the present. We assume that our current systems are permanent. But they are just historical accidents waiting for the next great interruption.
Building the Unforeseen
Our job as game designers is to increase the risk of predictability by building something genuinely “other.”. Our work is not to design the next of something; it is to design the first of something else.
But how do you design l’avenir when you don’t even have the language for it? This is where your methodical approach, the discipline you apply to strategy and prototyping, becomes the most powerful creative tool.
Design a game where the question becomes, “What is that?”
- Deconstruct Your Genre’s Assumptions (The Historical Accident): Take the genre you know best and list all its “permanent” features (e.g., Shooter: First-Person Camera, Health Bars, Headshots). Identify the Historical Accident, the feature that isn’t essential to the instinct (Combat, Acquisition, Escape) but exists purely because of platform or technology limitations 15 years ago.
- Prototype the Vocabulary: Tatu asks, “What’s the wildest thing you can imagine into existence that you don’t yet have language to describe to others?” Your job is to prototype the vocabulary. Build a prototype that demonstrates this “wildest thing” using only simple geometric shapes and text. Playtest it with people and watch their reactions.
Your job is to stop being trapped by le futur and start building the unexpected arrival of l’avenir.
Here is one of the advices I give to people trying to break into the industry: make sure you constantly meet people in real life.
Instead of staying at home preparing and sending résumés to dozens of applications, it is far better to spend two hours per day outside, perhaps at the gym or at a local course on something entirely unrelated to games.
This approach offers three crucial advantages:
1. Maintain Human Energy
You keep your energy levels high because you are meeting and talking with real humans, not just staring at a screen. Waiting for a response to an online application is passive and draining; engaging with the world is active and vital.
2. Design for Reality
When you meet people outside your professional bubble, you gain invaluable insight into their context. I often use these interactions to think about game design.
For example, I currently attend a Catalan language course twice a week. The class is full of nurses and public service workers who are there primarily to get a better contract, not necessarily to master the language. I notice they are tired, easily bored, and don’t want too much complication. Their lives are already full, balancing jobs and children.
How would I entertain someone like them? Not with a complex console game, right? They need a simple casual game, but it has to load fast and get straight into the gameplay. This helps me stay in touch with reality. It forces me to design for the actual, busy human being, not the idealized, endless-time “gamer.”
3. Unlock Lateral Opportunities
You significantly increase your chance of finding job opportunities in lateral sectors by meeting people who have nothing to do with the virtual bubble you’ve created in your online networks.
I honestly have the feeling that nowadays, it is often easier to find a job by going to the gym than by applying on LinkedIn.
I recently read a fascinating article on Enhance, the Japanese developer behind Tetris Effect and Lumines: Arise. Their company vision is, simply put, a breath of fresh air:
“Experience is king, synesthesia is queen.”
Synesthesia—the involuntary experience generated by stimulating one sensory pathway—and the concept of Kondō (to move emotionally) are the core of their design process.
I have a huge weak spot for companies with this kind of vision. They are hard to execute, but they make so much sense to me.
We are currently living in the era of the product managerization of game design, where every creative decision is filtered through short-term metrics. These experience-first points of view come like a breath of fresh air, reminding us of the original purpose of our craft.
We are humans making entertainment. Focusing solely on automation and metric-driven tuning can make us forget the human spark that creates great things.
Intense design discussions, deep conceptualization, and messy prototyping—that’s what I strive for.
Enhance starts by making music and then breaking that music down into pieces to design the right stages (levels). It is an inverted process that prioritizes the sensory and emotional outcome. It’s so interesting; I wish I could be in that room to see it.
The other day, I was reflecting on how I carved out my space in this industry.
Today, that reality has changed. I have other responsibilities, and I can no longer dedicate the same time to my work. My energy levels aren’t what they were 15 years ago. I worked extremely hard to secure the professional space and flexibility I have now.
I still engage with the medium: I play games, about two hours a week, and spend my evenings studying books and taking online courses. Lately, I’ve been particularly focused on the history of games.
Otherwise, I dedicate my energy to activities outside of the games industry. My passion successfully evolved into a job, and ultimately, a job is a job. With time, one has to work less not more.